Dear Diary,
It’s not unusual to incorporate some degree of subterfuge in the courtship process, whether you’re talking about Cyrano writing love letters under someone else’s name or everyone in Shakespeare pretending to be their brother/cousin/uncle, etc. Basically, it’s a time-honored romantic tradition.
Like Anton says, what’s more fun than a little cross-dressing?
M.P.M.
to start preparing while the other three printed copies of Lydia’s flyer for our alleged club, Concerned Citizens. Official slogan: For a Good Time, Do Good.
I had time to push in chairs, straighten stacks of magazines and papers, and turn on the lights in the dining room before the doorbell rang. With a burst of laughter and rustling grocery bags my friends hurried inside.
We put out bowls of sesame sticks, cashews, and wasabi peas, which Arden decided to combine into snack mix. There was seltzer for those who wanted it, and a plate of organic date rolls. Against my better judgment, Jasper and Bo had been prevailed upon to swell our numbers to something more club-like. Bo insisted on mood music, which he defined as “either Ella or Billie; I’m not picky.” Jasper found a compilation of Billie Holiday’s greatest hits.
The snacks, the smooth jazz—it reminded me of something.
“Feels like a faculty dinner party,” Jasper said, reading my mind. “Minus the cheap wine.”
“And the old people making passive-aggressive comments about each other’s research,” Bo pointed out.
Lydia held up a hand for silence. “Did you hear that?”
We dashed to the front windows, peeking from behind the curtains as a male figure—presumably Jeff—bent to lock his mountain bike. Even from behind I could tell he was shaped differently from most of the guys at our school, his torso broadening into sculpted shoulders that strained against the confines of his T-shirt. I’d never pictured myself with someone buff, but I would do my best to keep an open mind. Assuming he even noticed me, rather than being instantly smitten with one of my friends.
“At least he doesn’t look like he needs iron supplements,” Lydia muttered.
No, Nature Boy wasn’t a Cecil Vyse. And while it was too soon to pronounce him Millville High’s answer to George Emerson, he at least appeared capable of climbing a tree, should the occasion arise. Then he straightened.
“It’s him,” I said, as the back of his head came into view.
Arden gave me a funny look. “Did you invite anyone else?”
I shook my head, opting to play dumb rather than explain I hadn’t meant, Oh look, it’s Jeff! but Oh look, Jeff is Man Bun, a.k.a. the guy who’s been following Cam around!
“If we could get that cowrie shell necklace off him we might have something,” Lydia observed as he took a long drink from the water bottle attached to his bike.
Arden elbowed her. “Maybe Mary likes his necklace.”
“Yeah,” Lydia scoffed. “She can get one just like it when he takes her to Burning Man.”
We scurried away from the window as Jeff mounted the porch steps. When the knock sounded, Jasper slid toward the front door in his socks. My slight-framed brother looked Lilliputian next to our brawny visitor, who was gazing around the living room as though committing the details to memory. They’re bookshelves, I wanted to say. Full of books. Well, that and a pile of dirty field hockey gear, which Cam had brought home to wash on her off day from practice. Possibly I should have straightened that up.
“Why don’t you sit here, Jeff?” Having led the way into the dining room, Arden indicated the chair she had in mind. “Help yourself to some snack mix. And Mary, you can sit right next to him.”
“What about me?” Jasper asked. “Where should I sit?”
In a different room. Sadly, my throat had gone too dry to translate this thought into speech. I tried to think of something else to say, but the only conversational gambit I could come up with was, What’s the deal with you and my sister?
A door slammed overhead. Jeff’s head snapped up. After a moment of frozen stillness, he rose from his chair and moved toward the stairs as if pulled by a hooked line.
The rapid staccato of footsteps identified the person descending as Cam. She hurtled three-quarters of the way down before noticing Jeff. The moment seemed to swell, a bead of water expanding until it was too heavy to do anything but drop.
“Cam,” he said. I shivered, never having heard my sister’s name spoken quite that way.
Tearing her gaze from his, she cast a quick glance around the dining room, registering our presence.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him, hands fisted at her sides.
“I wanted to see you.” He made no mention of Concerned Citizens. Apparently it had been as much a ruse for him as it was for us. Which was . . . only fair.
Cam inhaled sharply. “No,” she said, sounding almost childlike in her defiance as she slipped past him.
“Cam—” He reached for her, then seemed to think better of it. His arm fell to his side. “Please.”
She stopped with her back to him, shoulders hunched. I’d never seen Cam shrink from anything in my life, including the perpetually enraged Doberman on the next block. Jasper and I exchanged baffled looks, eyebrows at maximum extension.
Jeff walked slowly around Cam until he was facing her again, placing his weight as cautiously as though he were approaching a wild animal. Lowering his head, he tried in vain to catch her eye. “Can we talk about this?”
Instead of taking him out with a reinforced elbow, Cam hesitated. The rest of us held our collective breath.
“That’s all I’m asking,” Jeff said quietly. He must have sensed the glimmer of opportunity. I could practically hear the pounding of his heart, in time with the heaving of his muscular chest. Though he wasn’t on his knees, his attitude was definitely one of supplication.
My sister relented so far as to look at him. Her complexion darkened. On anyone else, I would have called it a blush. She opened her mouth.
Instead of speaking, she lunged for the door. A second later she was barreling down the front steps.
“Cam!” Jeff shouted, giving chase. The screen door slammed behind him.
We hurried to the window in time to watch them round the corner and disappear, running full out. I thought of what Alex said about crossing a room to talk to someone. To me it had sounded like a conscious decision-making process, but this felt a lot more visceral than that. Maybe attraction wasn’t just something that happened in your mind. It could be entirely literal; a physical compulsion.
“Wow,” Arden sighed as we drifted back to the table. “That was something.”
Lydia popped open a can of seltzer. “Yeah, a disaster.” She gestured at the window. “Nature Boy chose option D. None of the above.”
“But wasn’t it epic?” Arden tugged the bowl of snack mix from Jasper’s greedy hands before he could finish it off. “I forgot what it’s like. There’s so much passion at the beginning of a relationship. You want to spend every second together, just staring at each other. You wouldn’t dream of canceling plans at the last minute or waiting four hours to answer a text.”
Jasper dragged the plate of date rolls to his side of the table. “Tell us more.”
“Don’t,” I warned her. “He’ll use it against you later.”
Terry’s hand darted out, snagging the second-to-last date roll. “I don’t blame him for liking your sister. She’s so bold and strong and—” She gestured mutely with one hand.
“Formidable?” I suggested.
“Scary?” Jasper countered.
Terry managed to shrug and nod at the same time.
“The chemistry was off the charts,” Bo chimed in. “So much tension in that scene. I would have set it in the middle of a rainstorm, though. Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
Arden clapped her hands together. “Or The Notebook!”
“If you want to go contemporary,” Bo conceded.
I found myself in the unaccustomed position of waiting for someone else to explain a reference. “What’s that?”
“You haven’t seen The Notebook?” Arden sat back, looking stunned, before visibly gathering her resolve. “That’s it, we’re going to my house right now. It’s totally based on a book,” she assured me, reaching for her purse.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Lydia said.
“Of course we’ll help clean up first.” Arden reached for one of the untouched glasses.
Lydia shook her head. “Are you up for this, Mary?”
“It’s Ryan Gosling,” Arden pointed out, as if that answered the question for me.
Lydia rolled her eyes. “Maybe she’s disappointed? Since we built up this whole Nature Boy thing and now”—she blew a raspberry—“we have nothing?”
“Not nothing,” Arden protested.
“Excuse me, I forgot the valuable lesson we all learned.” Lydia pretended to make a note. “Don’t try to get with a guy who has the hots for your sister.”
“It’s fine. Really.” The prospect of romance had been gossamer as a soap bubble, here and then gone. The odds of unrequited pining for Jeff, whom I had barely met, seemed slim.
“Trust me, this is the perfect movie for when you’re having all the feels.” Arden raised her index finger, in the universal sign for someone about to make a point. “I’m having another brain wave. Let’s take this to the next level. Tomorrow, my house, movie night and a slumber party. A two-for-one special.” She consulted her phone. “We are blazing through my list.”
“What list?” Jasper asked.
“None of your business.” The last thing I wanted to discuss in front of him was my induction into Normal Teenage Life. The mockery would never end.
“Tampon, maxi pad, cramps.” Arden’s incantation sent Jasper and Bo fleeing, hands over their ears.
“Nice,” said Lydia.
Arden winked. “Works every time.”
After dinner, I spread my books out on the dining room table and dived into the morass of homework. That was another difference between Millville High and my old school: due dates were a lot less negotiable.
When I finally looked up, rubbing tired eyes, the rest of the house was dark. Yawning, I rolled the kink out of my shoulders before depositing my tea cup in the sink. Then I gathered my things in a messy bundle and crept up the stairs, avoiding the creaky spots. As I passed Cam’s room I heard a series of rhythmic thuds and grunts, as if she’d installed a punching bag. Somehow she had returned to the house unobserved, suggesting either supernatural stealth or the tree outside her window. After a moment’s hesitation, I knocked softly.
“Yeah?” she called.
I pushed open the door. Cam was on her back on the braided rug, legs bent at the knee and arms crooked behind her head.
“You’re doing sit-ups?” On the face of it this was a stupid question, but Cam seemed to understand the unspoken now?
“I couldn’t sleep.” She wiped her forehead with the hem of her T-shirt.
“And . . . sit-ups help?”
She shrugged, looking away.
It seemed I would have to introduce the subject of the Incident, but how? It felt silly asking my fearless older sister if she was okay, though perhaps not as embarrassing as inquiring whether she now had a boyfriend, and if so what that was like.
“Jeff said your friend invited him over.” Cam’s words emerged reluctantly, but I was still grateful for the opening.
“I didn’t know,” I said quickly. “That the two of you had, you know, history. I mean, I saw you together a couple of times—”
“You did?” she interrupted, startled into looking up.
I nodded. “At that party. And your game.” Her eyebrows climbed fractionally, which by Cam standards was practically a double-take. “I’m a younger sister,” I said modestly. “We notice things.”
Belatedly, I recalled that Cam was also a younger sister. Strange that I’d never thought of her that way. “Is there a reason you didn’t want to talk to him?” I asked delicately, leaning against her dresser.
Cam reached for her water but didn’t take a drink. “I don’t know.”
None of the usual objections seemed to apply. She and Jeff didn’t come from different social classes, or warring clans. Besides, those lines were a lot more fluid in this century. Short of being royalty or blood relatives, there weren’t many barriers to a relationship between willing parties.
“You just don’t like him?” I finally asked, though that had not been my impression.
Her laugh sounded more like a sigh. “I wish.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to become a person I don’t recognize. Jeff’s girlfriend. Half of a couple. I like this me.” She thumped her thigh with a fist. “I don’t want to lose myself.”
“Is that what happens?”
She tipped her head back, leaning against the unmade bed. “How should I know? That’s how it looks from the outside.” Cam blew out a breath. “Since when is a high school guy mature enough to respect my autonomy?”
“He certainly looks mature.”
The ghost of a smile played across my sister’s face. She knew I was talking about Jeff’s manly physique.
Ignoring the blush I could feel creeping up my neck, I summoned a serious expression. Seeing them together this afternoon, I would have sworn the matter was a fait accompli. The emotion between them had felt so real, beyond anything I’d imagined existing in the realm of High School Relationships. Surely there could be only one outcome.
“You could always take a risk and see what happens?” The irony of saying this to the sister whose derring-do was the stuff of family legend wasn’t lost on me. Then again, in this one area, her bravery seemed to have a blind spot. “It wouldn’t have to be a lifelong commitment. Since you’re seventeen and all.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “You think it might be okay?”
Cam, the most resolute of my family members—possibly of anyone’s family members—soliciting my opinion? I would have to record this moment for posterity later.
“I do.” If Arden were here, she would already be plotting their next encounter. Almost I could hear her voice, speaking through me. “You could start small. Something low-pressure, like coffee or lunch?”
“Lunch,” Cam repeated, expression thoughtful. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
In the interest of discretion, I opted not to answer.